links for 2008-11-02
by Martin Belam, 2 November 2008
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From the comments: "Absurd. So now the talent will flow to other channels instead. Just what I want, to pay a license fee for even worse quality". Not entirely sure I agree with that - I don't necessarily think it is a bad thing for the BBC to act as a 'feeder club' building up on air talent and then passing them along to the commercial sector.
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"The Mail on Sunday, which broke the story, said the memory stick might allow someone to access the personal details of the 12 million people registered on it. But a spokeswoman for the Department of Work and Pensions said the device contained user names and passwords for testing an old version of the system, and all the information was encrypted."
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"An expert who examined it for The Mail on Sunday said it contained confidential passwords, security software and the technical blueprint to the system known as the 'source code'". Come on now, it isn't *known* as the 'source code', it either *is* the source code for the system or it isn't.
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I totally loved this comment: "This discussion is only worth blowing my time on because I'm drunk and its Friday. Bottom line is its a non-issue. I don't give a f*^$ who anyone endorses. If you think Eric Schmidt [CEO of Google] should keep mum, re-read the first amendment. If a guy decides to vote for Obama because Eric endorses him, the guy should be stripped of his right to vote".
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"How can journalists demonstrate that we can and will respect talented, passionate geeks as full partners (or even potential leaders) in collaborative efforts - not pigeonhole them as IT lackeys?". Or to put it another way - 'Working with computer scientists: What's in it for Hacks?'. No?
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James *almost* makes me feel nostalgic for the days of wading through the nonsense that got sent back to the BBC in reply to the BBC News Daily Email.
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"The web explodes with links willing to lead you around. We follow because a link is feedback. It’s a vote. It’s a pointer. We’ll click on links that create interest, promise to answer a question or take us to a form."
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"This study examines the question of whether tags can be useful in the process of information retrieval."
That last study doesn't really answer the question does it? The question it answers is 'Do users use the same terms as librarians to classify things?' and unsurprisingly the answer is 'yes'.
Do you know of anything which answers the original question? I am about to do something similar for an internal beeb thing and would be interested to see what you think is good research in this area.
Well, it is specifically around the music domain, so may not be applicable to your project, but Paul Lamere has a couple of great presentations on SlideShare that appear to be 'everything you could ever possibly want to know about tagging': Social Tags and Music Information Retrieval.